OAKLAND, Calif. — The massive criminal prosecution of ex-East Contra Costa police officers ended Tuesday afternoon in a federal courthouse, with the most paradoxical defendant of the bunch.

Former Antioch police officer Eric Rombough committed more crimes of violence than of his 13 former peers in law enforcement who also faced serious charges. He said racist things to colleagues, joked about hurting Black people in particular, and saved less-lethal rounds he’d used to shoot people as trophies. But later, Rombough admitted everything and aided prosecutors, taking the witness stand twice against officers he once considered friends, and matter-of-factly admitting his crimes in the name of wanting “to be able to look my sons in the eye and tell the truth.”

In the end, Senior U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White landed on a prison sentence of four years and two months for Rombough. It is more than even what prosecutors asked for, but White said without Rombough’s apology and testimony, he likely would have ended up in prison for 75 months or more.

White recalled his own experience presiding over all of the federal prosecutions, and concluded Antioch police had been “essentially on a rampage of unbridled violence, racism…basically imposing terror on the community.”

“It was a terrible thing on the entire community at large,” White said in court. “In many ways it appeared as though you were the ringleader of, I hate to say, terrorist police officers.”

Rombough apologized in court before he was sentencing, reading a statement that “stress, frustration, isolation, and poor judgment led me down the wrong path.” Later, White question him on his current mind state, and how he feels about the “people you hurt.”

“I feel horrible about the victims, I also feel horrible about the other police officers…that now have to clean up the mess I made,” Rombough said in court.

Prosecutors asked for a three-year prison term, arguing in court that this struck a balance between his crimes, “among the worst of the worst,” and attempts at redemption amid his own “grave remorse.”

“These are, in our view, horrific crimes,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Chang said in court Tuesday afternoon, after recounting officers’ violence and attempts to cover it up. “But there’s a second part of that story, that is in our view a remarkable contrast to that first part…we saw a tremendous turnaround as well, unlike anyone else in this case.”

Rombough’s lawyer, Tony Brass, argued for a nonspecific term of incarceration that is “just, individualized, and not greater than necessary.” In court, he quoted the quintessential police corruption film, Training Day, and said some of the blame rests with Rombough’s former department.

“Had there been better leadership, we might not be here at all,’ Brass said. “The truth is, they valued pit bull behavior.”

Rombough suffered from PTSD after shooting a man who had spent hours sniping at his Antioch neighbors and police — a justified shooting, prosecutors ruled — and that he “suffered severe collateral consequences: termination from law enforcement, reputational harm,” and forfeiture of his state pension, a defense sentencing memo says.

Chang said Rombough has “fully paid” restitution to a police brutality victim, who requested $3,308 in lost wages.

In August 2023, state and federal prosecutors charged 14 ex-Antioch and Pittsburg cops with crimes that ranged from imbecilic — taking liquor bottles as bribes to quash traffic tickets — to serious, like violating civil rights in the form of unauthorized dog bites and use of a less-lethal plastic bullet launcher. Rombough and two others, Devon Wenger and Morteza Amiri, were charged with forming a criminal conspiracy within the Antioch police department to dish out violent punishment and cover each others’ backs.

Of the three, Rombough’s charges were the most serious; he was accused of routinely shooting people, without cause, using his less-lethal launcher, and taking advantage of lax oversight from administrators, who never flagged his violent crimes as department policy violations.

He used the plastic bullets part of a display for an American flag on the mantle of his Solano County home, and joked about hurting “gorillas,” among other slurs he used to describe Black people.

The racist texts were said in group chat involving Antioch cops, dozens of whom were investigated for sending or receiving racist and homophobic content.

“I developed an angry, ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” Rombough said in court Tuesday, later adding, “I owed those I was arresting the same honor and dignity and everyone else … I used to know that and somewhere along the line I lost sight of that.”

When he was arrested with his co-defendants in a series of early morning FBI raids, he was brought to court in a t-shirt that read, “don’t weaken.”

All of this made his cooperation more surprising. He was among the first to plead guilty, and testified against Amiri, his closest police officer friend, and later against Wenger, a younger officer who prosecutors contend was schooled in civil rights violations by the other two.

Amiri was acquitted of conspiracy but convicted of violating a man’s civil rights with one dog bite. Wenger — who argued he was the “whistleblower” victim of a department cover up — was convicted of conspiracy but no individual acts of civil rights violations. Both men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

“One has to ask, what happened at Antioch police? ‘How did we get here,’ is a very legitimate question to ask,” Rombough’s lawyer, Brass, said at the Tuesday hearing. “The APD was infirm from the top down…the structure was to encourage police officers to be intimidating, to encourage police officers to have street credibility, which comes with violence and comes with violating the rules. To quote an infamous movie, ‘It takes a wolf to catch a wolf.'”

“That is not an excuse,” Brass added, “But it does explain what was happening here.”

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